My life as a Playboy Bunny girl

Twenty-five years after London’s Playboy Club closed, Hugh Hefner's Bunnies
are back. Kathryn Leigh Scott recalls her 'blissful' days as a Sixties Bunny

Hugh Hefner at a Playboy Club in 1960Photo: CORBIS

By Kathryn Leigh Scott

7:00AM BST 24 Apr 2011

'So you want to be a Bunny?” Keith Hefner, Hugh’s younger brother and the man in charge of hiring Bunnies for the opening of the New York Playboy Club in 1962, put that question to me and several hundred other young women responding to an ad in The New York Times: “Girls, Step Into the Spotlight! Be a Playboy Bunny…”

We showed up in droves, bringing swimsuits or leotards for our interviews, lured by the prospect of earning unheard-of sums ($200 a week!) as well as experiencing the glamour of working for Playboy.

Playboy Clubs had already opened in Chicago (the first; in 1960), Miami and New Orleans, with the likelihood of them opening in London and elsewhere in the world. No wonder the ad hinted at “opportunities to travel and meet internationally famous people in show business, politics and sports”.

Assisting at the Bunny auditions and subsequent training sessions were the leggy crème-de-la-crème of the Chicago, Miami and New Orleans Bunnies clad in the famous, form-defining satin costume with ears, collar and cuffs and fluffy tail. More than one Bunny hopeful sized up the ideal “Bunny Image” on display and didn’t bother staying for her interview.

Playboy published the vital statistics of the average Bunny in 1963: height 5ft 5in, weight 116½ llbs, eyes brown, hair brown, figure 35-22½-35, age 22.7, education two years of college.

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In reality, the Bunny Image embraced a range of women of every size, shape and hue. Pretty, young, provocatively attired girls have served paying customers for centuries, but Playboy had it down pat. When I worked as a Bunny in the early Sixties, there were scores of Manhattan cocktail lounges featuring scantily clad waitresses. At the famed Gaslight Club, buxom showgirls served drinks wearing Belle Epoch corsets and fishnet stockings. But no matter how alluring those girls were, Bunnies were the reason customers flocked to the Playboy Clubs.

Most of us auditioning for the coveted jobs did stay the course, encouraged by another message: Playboy had resoundingly rejected segregation in their clubs and made a point of hiring ethnically diverse Bunnies. Marion Barker, a tall, elegant 24-year-old African-American, Mai Mai Quong, an exotic Chinese African-American, and Jolly Young, a gifted Chinese maths student, were among the 125 Bunnies hired to open the New York club. The Bunny dressing- room, circa 1963, reflected more racial and cultural diversity than could be found on most college campuses more than a decade later.

Many applicants were students or aspiring actresses and models. I had a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and needed a bread-and-butter job that paid more than the $18 a week I earned working at Bloomingdale’s. So did the future supermodel/actress Lauren Hutton, who was hired the same day as me. In fact, Lauren and I nearly lost our jobs because we both had morning classes that prevented us from working the lunch shift, but were too young to work the evening cocktail hours. It was Keith Hefner who intervened, creating flexible hours for us.

Every day at one o’clock, I would fly out of classes, apply false eyelashes and hairpieces in the taxi on the way to the Club, race into the Bunny dressing room, ditch my schoolgirl clothes in my locker, stuff myself with anything handy to fill out the D cups of my costume, zip up and run to the gift shop to grab my cigarette tray, and begin my blissful four-hour parade through all seven floors of the New York club, listening to great jazz and stopping to chat wherever I pleased. I made so much money selling cigars and cigarettes with a Playboy lighter that I didn’t dare miss a day of work for fear someone would pinch my job.

This was heady stuff for a farm girl from Minnesota and new to New York. There was terrific cachet in being a Playboy Bunny (no disco in town would turn a Bunny away!) but the downside was that the Bunny mystique swamped any other identity. This was a “day job” you never wanted to mention to an agent, casting director or boy on a first date.

But just as the Club provided keyholders with the ultimate male fantasy of a bachelor pad stocked with gorgeous girls, Bunnies indulged themselves with their own whimsical role-playing. Susan Sullivan, who later starred in the TV sitcom Dharma and Greg, and who was attending university while working as a Bunny, says: “I’m an actress and I liked the idea of being in a costume and not being myself — I even altered my name and became Bunny Suzanne. I would go up to a table and say: 'Forthwith, my Lord, here is your gin and tonic.’ ”

Blondie’s Debbie Harry had worked as a waitress before working at Playboy. “Being a Bunny involved a rare combination for a woman in the workplace,” she says. “It was an unusual perception of women that they could be beautiful, feminine and very sexy, and at the same time ambitious and intelligent. At Playboy, those women had a place where they could use those attributes to make money — and also be really valued as employees. Bunnies were the Playboy Club.”

Playboy quickly realised they had mixed a volatile cocktail of beautiful young women wearing provocative costumes in a sophisticated party atmosphere teeming with alcohol-fuelled men. What to do about it?

As Debbie says: “There were strict codes of behaviour for both employees and customers. Bunnies had to maintain a certain decorum: if you overstepped the parameters, you were out of the game. The rules worked both ways. If a customer got out of line, he lost his Club membership. You knew that management backed you up and that you were protected. As someone who had worked as a waitress before, that was a shocking revelation.”

Most of us hadn’t worked as waitresses before – and Playboy seemed to prefer it that way. Bunny Training, presided over by the suave Keith Hefner, was a sort of Bunny boot camp in which we learned signature moves, such as the Bunny Stance, Bunny Dip, High Carry, Bunny Crouch and Bunny Perch. The Dip was a graceful backward arch with knees together, employed while serving drinks to keep the girl’s over-stuffed, over-extended breasts from popping out of the costume. The “High Carry” was designed to manoeuvre a tray full of drinks high over the head through a crowded room.

There were six of us in my Bunny training class, including a sophisticated college grad called Bunny Marie, who turned out to be a 28-year-old undercover reporter named Gloria Steinem. Most of us who had worked with Gloria read her subsequent exposé in Show magazine with dismay, and then a shrug. We were young, eager, and – as Gloria had been, ironically – using Playboy as a launching pad. Many of the women working as Bunnies were earning more than their fathers – this at a time when, in order for a woman to get a bank card or a mortgage, she had to have her father or husband co-sign. More than one Bunny saved her tips to buy her first property with cash. We really did believe we were at the vanguard of Women’s Lib.

More than 5,000 women worked as Bunnies who, as well as the world’s first supermodel and a rock’n’roll icon, included a distinguished scientist, two television network executives, a film producer, dozens of nurses and teachers, the owner of a multi-million dollar New York advertising agency, a race-horse breeder, one of the few female CEOs of a New York Stock Exchange company — and a midwife who was both a beauty queen and a nun before becoming a Bunny.

What struck me most about working at the New York Club was the amazing women I met, many of whom became lifelong friends. As Lauren Hutton said of us: “We were a rare bouquet.”

And now, more than 50 years after the first Playboy Club opened, a new era dawns. London is spearheading the Bunny revival, 25 years after the city’s original club closed, with a new-look Mayfair venue opening in June. It is being launched into a very different world: the original Playboy Clubs opened during a time of social change, with the advent of the sexual revolution and the exploding culture of miniskirts and discos. To be relevant in today’s still-more-permissive society, the new club will have a nostalgic feel, offering a Mad Men nod to the martini sophistication of Sixties cocktail lounges.

Barbara Haigh, a former London Bunny who now runs an East End pub, has been hired to help train the new corps (the advert states that potential Bunnies should be “elegant and sophisticated with a friendly personality”).Playboy knows all too well that the Bunnies, with their mythical aura, will still be the Club’s primary allure.